Stories

Second woman comes forward against Al Franken

Sen. Al Franken Photo: Dennis Van Tine / AP

LindsayMenz is accusing Sen. Al Franken of grabbing her buttocks while taking a photo together at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, CNN reports. "You just feel gross," Menz told CNN, "Like ew, I want to wash that off of me."Why it matters: Only days before, Leeann Tweeden shared her story of Franken, then a comedian, groping her and kissing her without consent when the two were on a USO tour in 2006. The Senate Ethics Committee is likely to launch an investigation into the matter. Franken responded to Menz's accusation in a similar way to his initial apology to Tweeden: "I take thousands of photos at the state fair surrounded by hundreds of people, and I certainly don't remember taking this picture. I feel badly that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected."

Self-driving lab head urges freeze after "nightmare" fatality

Uber self-driving car in Pittsburgh. Photo: Jeff Swensen / Getty

Carmakers and technology companies should freeze their race to field autonomous vehicles because "clearly the technology is not where it needs to be," said Raj Rajkumar, head of Carnegie Mellon University's leading self-driving laboratory.

What he said: Speaking a few hours after a self-driven vehicle ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Rajkumar said, "This isn't like a bug with your phone. People can get killed. Companies need to take a deep breath. The technology is not there yet. We need to keep people in the loop."

Why it matters: Virtually every major car company on theplanet, in addition to numerous startups and tech companies, are doing live testing of self-driving vehicles — and pushing policy officials to allow them to do so.

But Rajkumar said that ordinary people in addition to automakers and tech companies have developed far too much trust in self-driving technology simply because the cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles with only one fatality before this — a Tesla driver who slammed into the side of a truck last year.

Quote "This is the nightmare all of us working in this domain always worried about."

Senate committee probes Facebook, Cambridge Analytica

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Senate Commerce Committee is sending written questions to Cambridge Analytica's parent company and Facebook about the revelation that the data consulting firm improperly gathered user data from the social giant.

Why it matters: This is the most aggressive action by Republicans yet to investigate the reports about the Trump-linked analytics firm.

Quote“They’ve got responsibility to make sure that that information is used in an appropriate way, so we want to find out how it was gotten, how it was used, and we want Facebook obviously to be transparent about that.”

— Sen. John Thune

What they're saying: "We’ve got a questionnaire that we are sending out to the folks at Facebook and we’re going to have a series of questions for them to answer, and then we’re asking them to come in and brief us, and then we’ll decide based on that," said committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.)

The details: He said he wasn't sure yet whether Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg should testify before Congress, as some have called for. A committee spokesperson said the panel also planned to send questions to Cambridge Analytica parent SCL. A Facebook spokesperson said Monday night the company had received the questions and appreciated the opportunity to respond to them.